Feet First on Reagan, Neo-Conservatism, and Hegel

37 comments on “Feet First on Reagan, Neo-Conservatism, and Hegel”

1. “All of history, or what makes history a progressive history, is for Hegel or for Kojève’s Hegel…”

   An interesting disjunction–Hegel or Kojeve’s Hegel–because it implies that the latter isn’t a faithful rendering of the former’s teaching, but rather a revision.

   (As an aside–here’s an interesting quote from Stanley Rosen’s Nihilism: A Philosophical Essay: “Let us put to one side the here-irrelevant question of the philological validity of Kojeve’s interpretation of Hegel [i. e. there is some question as to its validity]. The central point is that Kojeve’s lectures on Hegel are philosophical; they constitute a work of philosophy in a sense to which Strauss never aspired. I say this even though I believe that, on most points of detail in their lifelong friendly disagreement, Strauss was, if not correct, certainly closer to the historical truth than Kojeve. Nevertheless, Kojeve was the more philosophical of the two.”)

   ‘Transcripts faithfully or perhaps slavishly tend to repeat his mistaken locution, which reads in full, nonsensically, “You and I know and do not believe…”’

   Now, I haven’t read the speech in question here and so I don’t know the context, but the quoted fragment seems to rely on the distinction between certitude and faith–“we are certain and not merely anticipating”–which is by no means nonsensical. If I’ve misunderstood you (or it), then I’ll have to stand corrected.

   From the Roosevelt quote: “It is more than that; it is a war for the survival of democracy. We are fighting to save a great and precious form of government for ourselves and for the world.”

   Hegel certainly didn’t regard democracy as “great and precious”, because he either believed or knew himself to be living in a perfectly rationalized polity–Prussian monarchy coupled with Prussian bureaucracy.

   From the Lincoln quote: “Fellow-citizens, we cannot escape history.”

   I have a sneaking suspicion that fifty thousand years from now, we’ll have “escaped history” well and truly–even the Civil War, with its glorious culmination in the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Amendments.

   “what Strauss does not seem to have considered is that the German phase of the Hegelian project may have been displaced and absorbed (or perhaps “sublated”) by the American state-national and global or neo-imperial project.”

   Strauss didn’t believe that there was a “German phase of the Hegelian project” but only a German phase of Hegelian influence. That Strauss was resolutely opposed to Hegelianism on purely philosophical grounds, having nothing whatever to do with empirical phenomena like “the American state-national and global or neo-imperial project” is something that I believe can easily be demonstrated from several different places in his work.

   One such would be the end of the Restatement on Xenophon’s Hiero, starting at the long paragraph which begins, “I need not examine Kojeve’s sketch of the history of the Western world.” It is shocking not only in its opposition to “Kojeve’s Hegel”, but to modern political philosophy generally.

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   • Thanks for the thoughtful observations, and the Rosen on Kojeve – going to have to put Rosen on my list. There is much else you’ve said that I’ll want to think over, and return to, perhaps after I’ve published the piece that the footnotes belong to, but, just for now:

     Yes on the distinction and its import: The extent to which K has modified H for his own purposes has been a subject of much discussion. I think the former’s interpretations or uses of the latter are arguably justifiable, but are also interesting in their own right, in part because and for exactly how they do diverge. K, just to give one example, claims that H is implicitly atheist, and has in fact performed the ultimate and irrefutable atheistic proof, something that Hegel, who may have suffered justifiable anxiety in regard to that perfect Prussian state, never stated and in fact directly rejected. K is also considered one of those responsible for rendering “Herr-Knecht” as “Master-Slave.”

     On RWR: I think if you read the portion of the speech where Reagan says “You and I know and do not believe” in context, you’ll see that he could not have intended to make a distinction between knowledge and belief, since what follows is something – “that life is so dear and peace so sweet as to be purchased at the price of chains and slavery” – that “you and I” do not “know” at all, in Reagan’s view. The lines come near the end of the transcript – see http://www.reagan.utexas.edu/archives/reference/timechoosing.html If you watch the video, you’ll see him very briefly recognizing his mistake just after he makes it.

     As for Strauss and Hegel, I’ll have to find the place where he offers his opinion about the Hegel-state or Hegelian state project coming to an end when the Nazis took power. Something that never existed can’t come to an end. However, I’m paraphrasing, and will have to get his exact wording, as it may resolve the apparent contradiction, or help you to assemble your counter-evidence more effectively!

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     • (edited the above comment for clarity (and vanity, too, of course))

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     • I’m aware of the reference you’re making to “Hegel ended when the Nazis took power”–I only wish I’d made a note as to where that is. I could undoubtedly track it down, but it might take me a long while to do so. I do recall, however, that Strauss is quoting someone else when he says that. It seems that I’ve come across that reference more than once in my reading of Strauss–at least one of those references was undoubtedly from one of the Hegel course transcripts. I could almost swear that on one occasion it is attributed to Carl Schmitt.

       Be that as it may–and entirely aside from any disputation concerning Strauss’s receptivity to Hegelianism–I’d be interested in your response to the passage from the Restatement.

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     • I thought both Reagan and Lincoln were quite clear, Lincoln might have been a little hyperbolic, he didn’t want to sound like Cicero, recovered in the 5th Century AD, when the state and the church had fused into one authority, and self government was a fiction, some might say, the regime of President Snow, was what Reagan might have feared in addition to foreign powers,

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2. K, just to give one example, claims that H is implicitly atheist, and has in fact performed the ultimate and irrefutable atheistic proof, something that Hegel, who may have suffered justifiable anxiety in regard to that perfect Prussian state, never stated and in fact directly rejected.

   Now, I myself am entirely open to the idea that Hegel may have concealed his heterodoxy–but whatever happened to the idea that we can only impute to an author ideas that are derived from “his own explicit statements”? You know, a la Strauss and his love for the “great and precious form of government”?

   (As an aside–you don’t strike me as an atheist or as someone who is supportive of political atheism. Would you mind commenting on that?)

   Also, I just want to say that, while it is certainly possible to make an absolute distinction between Hegel’s teaching and Kojeve’s revision/reinvention of same (and, say, a Right-Hegelian might want to do so), it seems to me that you are necessarily committed to the notion that Kojeve’s Hegel is a more or less accurate interpretation of Hegel. And it appears that that is the stance you are indeed taking in your reply to my comment. Thus, in your case, it is enough to show that Strauss utterly repudiated Kojeve’s Hegel in order further to demonstrate that Strauss couldn’t have been very receptive to Hegel simpliciter–and that is what the Restatement shows.

   Finally, I find your reference to the Hegelian “project” to be odd.

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3. Just some quick, provisional notes today and perhaps for a while, since I have family obligations today and life obligations (make a living) over the next few.

   Proceeding in rough reverse order:

   Hegelian project: The notion that in the century or so after Hegel there was or may have been something amounting to a collective project, in Germany and elsewhere, in fact a central civilizational or civilization-defining project, to produce a state or states conforming to the outlines Hegel produced, especially in the Philosophy of Right – not because Hegel outlined it and was an influential figure, though he did and was, nor because politicians, bureaucrats, public figures, and so on, were cribbing from Hegel’s books, but because the project was already under way in Hegel’s time as Hegel explained, and because it filled or seemed to fill the needs and serve the purposes that Hegel described.

   Whether Kojeve faithfully interprets or completes or revives or transforms or very problematically disfigures or perhaps exposes Hegel’s thought is, I think, rather obviously a complex question. I don’t see myself as committed or at this point even capable of meaningfully committing to one or another position on the narrow question of K’s faithfulness to H. What is Hegel’s thought? What did Hegel think Hegel’s thought was? Is what Hegel thought Hegel’s thought was what Hegel’s thought was, or is Hegel’s thought a moving target, and did Hegel intend it to be? If he did, a lack of faith to “Hegel” might be an act of faith to what Hegel meant to mean, but not any lack of faith would necessarily qualify as such, of course.

   I’m a bit reluctant to point to a piece I wrote on Strauss v Hegel, because I wrote it a few years ago, when I was just starting out on a path on which, as it happens, ON TYRANNY was a prominent signpost, and I had just begun to read and re-read Hegel and think about Strauss. Yet, as I read it today, I’d be willing to stand by it: https://ckmacleod.com/2011/01/02/almost-everyone-vs-the-whole-thing/ I assumed you’d already read it.

   Organizing the rest of my thinking on Hegel and Strauss and Kojeve, and whatever evolutions in it, would be one of those major projects I might pray for the opportunity someday to perform – which statement brings us naturally to the question on belief: I’ve also written many times on atheism or a/theism. In short, I’m not confident we agree enough on what the term, or its main constituents – god, belief, negation of belief in God or, differently, belief in negation or absence of the divine – even mean or can mean. To quote Strauss quoting a theologian at a significant moment in Strauss’s own investigation of onto-theological questions: “What would God be?” I’d invite you to read the pieces under my “anismism” heading, maybe try this short piece: “Because the Question ‘What is God?’ is Impossible.”– Or you might read Peirce’s short essay on “The Concept of God,” in which Peirce, who also declined to sign on to atheism, makes some very sensible comments on the problem of claiming to disbelieve in whatever may be signified by a “necessarily vague” word like “God.” I got to Peirce only this year, and was very pleased to find he had devoted himself to notions of the belief-presumptions of any inquiry at all… He sought to distinguish his own thinking from Hegel’s, but I find an underlying unity in their positions as I understand them, or perhaps as I presume to insist on it.

   I do think that the reference to the Nazis and the destruction of the Hegel-state were in Strauss’s own words. I’ll make an effort of my own to find the passage, since I now see how useful it will be in explaining my own view on, putting it roughly, the American neo-imperial state as the unexpected extension and unrecognized implication of Hegel’s philosophy of world history. As for the Restatement – see my above pleas and prayers: Strauss’s “Restatement” is a very interesting piece of writing, written at a very interesting moment… justifying more extensive and careful reflection than I can give it now…

   Happy Thanksgiving! It’s already past noon out here, and I need to… do some stuff.

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4. I managed to locate one of the references vis a vis “today Hegel died” (again, I’m convinced I’ve come across this somewhere else as well). This is from the Hegel 1958 course transcript. You’ll be pleased to know that, in this very context, Strauss goes on to talk about Kojeve’s Introduction to the Reading of Hegel. It occurs on p. 71 of the typescript.

   “When Hitler came to power in January of 1933 I remember well that one of the cleverest public lawyers said, ‘Today Hegel died’ because Hegel in a way really ruled Germany and especially Prussia up to the time of Hitler. I mean, this notion of government which Hegel had, and the rule of intelligence as he called it (which meant the rule of a very well trained and conscientious civil service) came to an end and now party government took over completely–or popular government of a sort. The only form in which the Hegelian sort of government survives today is that by a French scholar of Russian origin…, who wrote probably the best book on Hegel in this generation… It is the most valuable one on Hegel of which I know.”

   He goes on to talk briefly about Kojeve’s interpretation.

   I’m well aware that this passage–precisely because it refers to Kojeve–can be construed as lending support to the point you’re seeking to make. Strauss clearly recognizes that the continuation of the Hegelian state project, as you term it, is contained in Kojeve’s teaching.

   So the question becomes: What was Strauss’s assessment of that teaching (aside from the fact that it was philosophically interesting)? I can only repeat that we must take into account the Restatement on Xenophon’s Hiero–because there, I believe, Strauss evinces irremediable opposition to Kojevean Hegelianism and that would seem to be relevant to this consideration.

   Also, please note that Strauss describes Nazism as “popular government of a sort”. This would imply that the end of the Hegelian state project is the coming of popular government.

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   • Thanks – very interesting. Is the course transcript available on-line?

     The reference to which I was referring, and have yet to go search for, was much more compact.

     In the remarks you quote, Strauss is using a narrow definition of Hegel’s “notion of government,” while “today Hegel died” is obviously a statement open to interpretations. I view Hegel’s idea of the state as not just an idea of an intelligent – or reasonable – political-administrative bureaucracy – but as among other things encompassing the entirety of what he called a “culture-state,” ideally producing among other things a balance or harmony of types of social forces, including a place for “popular government.” In other words, the ideal Hegel-state would be or would resemble a mixed regime. It includes, for example, a monarch, but a monarch who is far from a despot, whose signature on an act is a moment of unification in a manifold collective process that also involves representative or popular government bodies as well as civil society.

     I also believe, as I’ve suggested several times, that Hegel’s perspective was necessarily incomplete. If Hegel had possessed prophetic powers, he might have imagined a future in which a massively wealthy, militarily super-powerful, and secure nation would arise in North America, would necessarily develop technologies of global reach, and would re-orient the global map with itself at the center. If Hegel’s philosophy of world history has validity, then the basis for such a “world-historical” transformation must be visible within it, even if Hegel himself was unable to develop the picture ahead of time.

     Kojeve, as you might know, was very active in the development of the European Economic Community, forerunner of the EU, which is more commonly called a Kantian rather than a Hegelian project, but is also commonly depicted in the same way that Strauss is depicting or narrowly defining the Hegelian state. Kojeve is also believed to have worked secretly with the Russians, by the way – a fact which would compromise him in the eyes of many, especially American conservatives. Yet in his debate with Strauss, he quite openly provides a  justification for doing so – for “advising the tyrant” and letting historical necessity take care of the rest.

     My last rambling word on the subject this morning will be that what I think appalls Strauss in Kojeve, as it appalls conservatives viewing Kojeve, is his interpretation of the Cunning of History as a theodicy without God, or with Human Being or History in place of God or identical with God, and Hegel as His/Its/Our prophet, Kojeve as Hegel’s witness, able to make WW2, Stalin, and even Hitler (as for Hegel Napoleon) agents of progress. For us (unspeakably yet everywhere spoken), if we identify America and the globalization of Americanism with progress of that type or progress as it ever could be for us, the worst events ever were also the best events ever, necessarily, as warrants for the American-led and -secured order of the world.

     Strauss seems to fear, I think like Voegelin, and perhaps rightly, that as soon as this in some ways utterly reasonable way of viewing the evolution of the state becomes embraced as a reason of state – as when political intellectuals embrace a “worse the better” praxis – the state loses contact with morality at all, and will turn utterly unreasonable as well as immoral.  See also Strauss’ criticism of Schmitt as we’ve previously discussed: Philosophy leads in most times and places to a moderate or in the Straussian sense “classically” “liberal” politics, conditioning impartiality and openness regarding thoughts that common opinion treats as inadmissable, dangerous to the health of the state if allowed to spread. Schmitt from the right and Kojeve from the left become leading justifications for such fears, in a way necessarily and really, practically dangerous to philosophy and philosophers as well as to the state.

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     • I have downloaded numerous Leo Strauss course transcripts in recent years–if memory serves, mostly from archive.org, which is where I assume I got that one. They are typically photocopies of old typescripts, though the online Leo Strauss Center has a few transcripts available in quite nice versions. I’d be perfectly willing  to send you a copy of my folder–though I’m not entirely sure that I know how to do so, as my understanding of computers is limited.

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       • The Strauss center lists the Hegel courses as “pending.”

         Sending me your collection would would be very kind of you. Depending on the size of the folder you may be able to attach it to an email, or just send the particular transcript in question. If it’s too large, then there are user-friendly and free filesharing tools. I can email you later at the address you use when you comment, but right now I have to return to work in the salt mine.

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       • I’m continuing to work as time permits on the post/essay that belongs to these notes, and, while looking for the Strauss quote I had in mind (still haven’t done a serious search through my dead tree shelf), I discovered an interesting review – Nazi or Philosopher? – whose main subject is Heidegger, but which attributes the original statement, on the death of Hegel’s “constitutional state” in the Nazi regime, to Schmitt, who considered himself anti-Hegelian at the time, but was attacked as a crypto-Hegelian heretic by Nazi ideologues. If Strauss took it from Schmitt, it would be interesting if he suppressed the source consciously or otherwise, though I suppose it’s just as possible that the thought was “in the air” among German intellectuals. Quite helpfully, the reviewer, Steven B. Smith, quotes Heidegger replying to Schmitt to the opposite effect – that “it was only then [when the Nazis took power] that [Hegel] began to live.” Of course, I think all three were somewhere around half-wrong, for reasons I’ve already indicated.

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         • Looking again over the quote from Strauss you provide, and noting the one from the Smith review, “one of the cleverest public lawyers” seems clearly to be Schmitt. So, we can forget my “in the air” comment, and wonder, probably idly, why Strauss would speak as he does about Schmitt and Kojeve, brought into proximity by Hegel, Hitler, and the question of the state. (I’m seeing also that the sentence on Kojeve seems to be missing a phrase or two possibly crucial to making sense of it.)

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         • I always meant to thank you for citing this review (by Steven B. Smith) of Emmanuel Faye’s book on Heidegger–a book that I happen to have read several years ago. I’m tempted to say a few things about the review itself–which I found interesting for reasons that were no doubt unintended by Mr. Smith–but I realize that you cited this piece because it gives a reference for Carl Schmitt’s remark from “his book *State, Movement, People* (1933)” concerning the “death” of Hegel. Suffice it to say that, despite all the ritual denunciations of Heidegger’s Nazism, Mr. Smith simply has to acknowledge the compelling significance of Heidegger’s thought. One might even say it’s a case of Heidegger speaking with authority–and not as the scribes.

           I don’t know if you ever had occasion to look up the Schmitt quote in the original text. I was reading a book this weekend–*Heidegger and Marx* by Laurence Paul Hemming–when I came across the following passage, which occurs on pp. 160-2 of that work. The context is a discussion of Faye’s book. Quotes there are given in the original German as well as in English translation–since you read German, I thought you might rather have the German.

           Faye provides a very polemical account of the protocols of a seminar course of the winter semester 1934-35 held together with Erik Wolf entitled *Hegel: On the State*. Faye seizes upon the report of Heidegger’s statement in these seminars that “Man hat gesagt, 1933 ist Hegel gestorben; im Gegenteil: er hat erst angefangen zu leben” as evidence of his formal commitment to Nazism. In saying this, Heidegger is citing Carl Schmitt (while not naming him), suggesting (absolutely contrary to Faye’s suggestion) in the very citation a transformation in the way 1933 should be read. In 1933 Schmitt had noted: “Erst als der Reichspraesident am 30. Januar 1933, den Fuehrer der Nationalsozialistischen Bewegung, Adolf HItler, zum Reichskanzler ernannte, erhielt das Deutsche Reich wieder eine politische Fuehrung und fand der deutsche Staat die Kraft, den staatsfeindlichen Marxismus zu vernichten…. An diesem Tage ist demnach, so kann man sagen, ‘Hegel gestorben.'” The regime and its epigones (of whom Schmitt was one) made a clear association between Hegel and Marx: the one was “responsible” for the other. In his statement to the effect that Hegel had not died, Heidegger rejects the narrowness of this view, and in doing so recognizes that Hegel is fundamentally *describing* the character of the state in its relation to subjectivity as a whole (and so not just as “Marxism” secures it), and that the metaphysical position which Hegel lays out remains at the basis of not just Marxism, or Americanism and “world democracy,” but Nazism as well. Heidegger returns to his understanding of Hegel’s thought not as a speculative source of “theory,” a mere set of opinions, but a genuine phenomenology–even if a phenomenology of the “completion of metaphysics”–of “the” political. Heidegger’s description of Hegel’s thought as the completion of metaphysics significantly predates Heidegger’s own commitment to Nazism, and so we can see how, in making this judgment, Heidegger is returning to a view that he had briefly abandoned when, in embracing Hitler, he embraced the notion of the “leader” and the state as the “being” of the nation–a view which *in itself* is entirely consistent with Hegel’s theory of the state. Heidegger, in other words, in arguing that in Nazism Hegel had come fully alive, is acknowledging his own commitment to Hegel’s metaphysics, during his Nazism, and for the period of the rectorate, at least. In understanding the extent to which Nazism and Hitlerism are a form of the fulfillment of Hegel’s theory of the state, and in embracing once again his rejection of Hegel as an overcoming of metaphysics, Heidegger is, without doubt (and whatever else he is doing), repudiating Hitler’s claim to be the embodiment of the particularity of the “destiny” for the German people enshrined in the Nazi “program.”

           Faye, as he ordinarily does, ignores the provenance and the context of the citations from which he often makes great capital, and so fails to see that Heidegger’s very reference in 1934 to Schmitt represents a challenge to Schmitt’s interpretation of the events of 1933, and therefore to his (Heidegger’s) own support for the events of 1933, when he had effectively thrown in his lot with Schmitt as much as with Hitler. Schmitt counterposed the Nazi state to the organization of the state in liberal democracy (the “Hegelian state” of which he speaks) because the Nazi state alone had the power to meet and overcome the challenge of Marxism, itself *also* a consequence of Hegel’s theory of the state: it is in this sense that Hegel was “dead.” In Heidegger’s preparatory notes for the seminar for which Faye has the protocols, Heidegger’s notes explicitly rejected Schmitt’s interpretation, arguing “Karl Schmitt denkt liberal.”

           On p. 163, Hemming gives two additional quotes that I think are relevant:

           Schmitt (fr. Staat, Bewegung, Volk): Die politische einheit des gegenwaertigen Staates ist eine dreigliedrige Zusammenhang von Staat, Bewegung, Volk. Sie unterschiedet sich von dem aus dem 19. Jahrhundert uebernommenen liberal-demokratischen Staatsschema von Grund auf.

           Heidegger (fr. Hegel: Ueber den Staat): Selbst auf die Gefahr hin dasz von Hegels Staatsdenken kein Stein auf dem anderen bleiben sollte, muessen wir uns mit ihm auseinandersetzen, weil eben Hegels Philosophie die *einzige* bisherige Philosophie ueber den Staat ist.

           I’m not sure I follow Hemming’s commentary at every point. According to him, Schmitt conceived “Hegel”—or, to use the expression you often employ, the Hegelian state project—to mean liberal democracy (as do you). Liberal democracy—the Hegelian state project—was in turn vulnerable to Hegelianism’s “daughter faith”, Marxism—the Marxist state project, so to speak. Because the NSDAP was fiercely anti-liberal and anti-communist, neither the Hegelian nor the Marxist state projects had any possibility of forming the German state as of 1933.

           Heidegger, on the other hand—according to Hemming—originally believed and (after a temporary lapse coinciding with the accession of Hitler to the chancellorship) later came to believe once again, that the Hegelian state project encompassed all the modern regime-types: liberal democracy, fascism, communism. But this leaves one wondering why Heidegger would have said that in 1933 the Hegelian state project “first began to live”, if the Hegelian state project were consonant with both Nazism and its predecessor regime. Setting aside the notion that Heidegger is merely negating Schmitt’s claim in a provocative and exaggerated way, it suggests that in Nazism the Hegelian state project (in Heidegger’s view) was somehow more fully realized than in liberal democracy or communism.

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           • Interesting and very complicated – so following it very difficult – since all of the intellectual targets move as they fire back at each other. “Liberal democracy” is one such, an even oxymoronical compound of two terms further compounded for all practical purposes by long and contradictory histories of usage. It’s not too much to say that the Nazi temptation was attractive, and not just to political intellectuals, precisely as a would-be answer to this very “state” of confusion.

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             • I wouldn’t say “It’s not too much” or “precisely”–that would be, for me, to beg the question. Nazism or fascism was/is attractive as an alternative to the thoroughgoing ugliness of communism and democracy. The ugliness of communist society is well known. The ugliness of democracy, though less obvious due to capitalism’s glittering wealth, manifests itself rather conveniently in the Charlie Hebdo affair–the rallying cry of Westerners is to defend the “freedom” (license, licentiousness) to purvey blasphemy and pornography. One might suppose such a state of affairs to be somehow necessary, but it is simply impossible to characterize it as noble. Fascism alone had/has an aspiration to the noble and beautiful, the great. Nazism was fatally flawed precisely by its indifference to the means to that end. The fatal flaw of Western democracy, by contrast, seems to me to be indifference to any end–the means alone are its end, a contradiction that forebodes its imminent dissolution.

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               • In my reply (to your reply to the Hemming extract) I thought myself somehow to be taking issue with you. On further consideration, I realize that you said nothing with which I disagree.

                 On several previous occasions, you’ve emphasized the “oxymoronic” or contradictory nature of liberal democracy. Liberalism–self-consciously to refrain from the exercise of political power–and κρατία/cracy (of δημοκρατία)–rule or power–simply can’t blend, but only stand alongside one another in uneasy, tenuous relation (if that). Communism and liberal democracy are similar, if not identical, in their being each a rule of the demos, the working class (the former sans the adjective “liberal”, of course).
                 

                 In my comment, I emphasized the “ugliness” of both communism and liberal democracy. Their mutual “demos” character likely has something to do with that. In the case of liberal democracy, that ugliness no doubt correlates as well to its oxymoronic, contradictory character. Liberal intellectuals, it would seem, are as desirous to resolve the contradiction of “liberal” democracy as their fascist counterparts–in the latter case, by negating liberalism; in the former, by negating rule or power.

                 Both these proclivities are liable to critique, but it strikes me that the liberal/libertarian will-to-non-power is ludicrous. Thus we increasingly find that liberal political causes are silly or perverse, centering on undeserving minorities, sexual fetishism and now pornographic cartoonism. The current “martyrs” of liberalism are a bunch of pornographic cartoonists–all Westerners are being asked to honor these martyrs to the liberal-democratic cause.

                 Such a political and ethical order–centered on fun, silliness, irreverence and “nothing matters” (nihilism)–may endure for a few more decades or another century–but it isn’t a politeia for the ages. The empire of liberty turns out to be the empire of fun and silliness. It’s well-nigh inconceivable that liberal democracy–something nonsensical–will be around five hundred to a thousand years from now, but Islam, liberalism’s pesky irritant, almost certainly will.

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                 • As I re-read that virtuosic explication by Hemming, I now see its difficulties melting away, and I wish I had the time (which is at the moment very oppressively exactly what the cliche says it is) first to “unpack” the passage, second to address your question of a “politeia for the ages” in connection with other topics we’ve discussed, even including your very problematic, to my mind insufficiently considered political self-descriptions and attendant self-indulgences.

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                   • Well–with a teaser like that you simply must follow through and not leave me hanging.

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                   • Have to.

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                   • As I re-read that virtuosic explication by Hemming, I now see its difficulties melting away,

                     I’m keen to read the explication of the explication–which explication will, I’m sure, be every bit as virtuosic as the original.

                     I’m also keen to be apprised of my insufficiencies, indulgences, etc.

                     If you need a few days–even a few weeks–fine; but you will deliver the goods as soon as circumstances permit, won’t you?

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                   • If you need a few days–even a few weeks–fine; but you will deliver the goods as soon as circumstances permit, won’t you?

                     Don’t mean to be overly dramatic, and I don’t like to talk about my personal situation, but, honestly, it’s really more a question of “if ever” not “as soon as” from where I’m sitting.

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     • No, I don’t that’s it, amorality is probably what rankles Strauss, although one might flow from the other, re Nietzche’s mixed feelings about Gott en Totten, De Tocqueville had the prophetic vision, as did Orwell although he cribbed from Burnham,

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       • Not sure what you’re aiming for there, don miguel – statement is a little garbled. De Tocqueville also, of course, had the benefit of direct observation of the young United States.

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5. A thought experiment, think of an alternate reality where the US adopted Hegelianism, and Germany adopted Locke, what kind of a world would that be,

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   • An absurd world.

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   • The problem, Cervantes, is that it isn’t a thought experiment.

     You see, if MacLeod is right then the United States has adopted Hegelianism–or the Hegelian state project, as he terms it. Meanwhile, die Bundesrepublik–by virtue of being conquered by the Anglo-Saxons in the Second World War–is essentially indistinguishable from Anglo-Saxon progressive commercial liberalism, replete with multiculturalism, the oh-so-important objective of emancipating sexual fetishism, etc., etc.

     An absurd world, indeed.

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     • Interesting set of problems here. I had (of course?) attempted a longer reply to don miguel. It may strike you as an inordinately fine distinction, but it is quite possible for the US to fulfill and in critical ways to adopt “Hegelianism” or the Hegelian state project without adopting Hegelianism as official ideology. America or rather we could, overall, live in a state of “false consciousness” about ourselves. We may, in other words, be tremendous hypocrites, maintaining Lockean pretensions while everywhere engaged in Hegelian dirty work. Likewise Germany and the EU may maintain ideas about what they are or aspire to be, but be revealed as in critical ways dependents on America, including the dynamic contradictions (or hypocrisies) of Americanism.

       I think the problem of ideas in history is naturally quite complex, but regardless of your stand on how they all seem to be working out or not, what I thought absurd was the notion that America would go all in with a or the typically German thinker, while Germany would prefer an Englishman. To me it’s a bit like asking, “What if America were Germany, and Germany were America?” or “What if Americans spoke German, and Germans spoke English?”

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6. the sophistry endorsed by some of those on your twitter feed, re the Kyle story, is really breathtaking, it’s as if ISIS never arose, which is Zarquawi’s old outfit, with a new chief,

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   • You should see some of the pieces I haven’t re-tweeted, but I found the Slate piece by Dana Stevens balanced in a very thoughtful way. http://t.co/8pxH2dYDUo

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7. well this still demonstrates a moral vacuum, saturated in oikophobia, the notion that we are the greater evil,

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8. Eastwood’s whole oevre, going back to the spaghetti western, is how does one deal with evil and corruption, from VanCleef’s corrupt Union colonel, to Holbrook’s police commissioner in Magnum Force, to Hackman’s character in Unforgiven, if memory serves, it’s about institutional corruption as well, for the similar reasons,

    

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9. Haven’t yet seen AMERICAN SNIPER, and not sure when I will, so obviously can’t comment on the film itself responsibly, but only on its reception: As I stated on Twitter, the leftwing response so far suggests a mirror image of the rightwing response to AVATAR, including an apparent, predictable refusal or inability to begin with the movie and the popular response to it on their own terms.

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10. Except Avatar was about a fictional interplanetary war, whereas American Sniper is about a very  real threat, which manifests itself not on in Ramadi, but Beziers or Birmingham

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    • I said a mirror image, don miguel: For example, AVATAR presented a fictional interplanetary war that the right insisted on treating as real-political; AS presents a version of a true story/real predicament that the left insists on treating as bad fiction. Now it would take more time than I have to explain that if it’s necessary.

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11. well this episode of colonial marines extreme, was supposed to be an allegory of the Indian Wars, Vietnam and Iraq,

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    • One way of interpreting AVATAR, but public not as interested in paranoid rightwing defensiveness as paranoid defensive rightwingers are.

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